Prufrock and Modernism

Eliot’s poem “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” seems very much like a modernist poem. It seems as though Eliot’s poem takes a step away from the security of society and poets by posing his own ideas of inferiority. The epigraph shows the type of exclusion that Levenson discusses in his article. As we discussed, he locks some people out of understanding the poem by writing it in Italian. The poem also embodies the type of exclusivity of modernism that Scott discusses. In the same way modernism pushes away women and other races, so does Eliot in his poem. Instead of embracing his feelings and “the question” he pushes them away. In a sense, Eliot’s poem becomes modernism.  
This question he refuses to answer, as we dicussed in class, has to do with a woman. It has to do with his inability to truly express himself to her and get something out of her. In the same way the speaker of the poem is unable to confront the woman, so is modernism. I think this is important in understand modernism. As a movement, modernism is universal and timeless, as is this poem. The feeling of inferiority that the speaker feels can apply to anyone. The turn away from the humanistic idea of the self as the center reflects a struggle of the literary and non literary world.  
I think the continuous references to age and fog show the age of the literary world and the fog is a representation of the clouded view that blocks modernism from accepting anything different from the canon; the basic model.